With both bare palms pressed flat against the searing belly of his bronze cauldron, Kaelen guided the twin exhaust flues into a low, steady whistle.
The heat would have blistered an ordinary mortal’s skin in half a heartbeat. Under the diamond-tempered skin of an Iron Bone cultivator, the searing bronze felt like nothing more than a warm river stone on a sunny afternoon.
Inside Kaelen’s dantian, each real second at the 169x burst rate yielded the equivalent of 169 baseline minutes of work.
Ten minutes on the arena floor stretched out into 1,690 baseline hours—more than nine weeks of continuous, uninterrupted alchemical focus.
Inside the belly of the cauldron, the three sets of bruised marrow roots, Iron-Root Grass, and raw cinnabar broke down into a swirling vortex of emerald essence. Under Kaelen’s 169x comprehension, every bruised cell wall ruptured on command, yielding 169 times the medicinal potency that an ordinary apprentice could wring from the stalks in a single minute.
Instead of spoiling the batch, the bitter frost-salts from the unpeeled skins locked the volatile cinnabar vapors directly into the marrow core. Not a single wisp of medicinal Qi leaked past the bronze rim.
Ordinary alchemists peel the root because Guild textbooks call the outer skin bitter, Kaelen thought, feeling the currents of heat swirl beneath his fingertips. They throw away the natural mineral binder, and then they wonder why their pills crack when the fire cools.
